EverythingPeople This Week!

According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends Report 2018, 56% of talent professionals say that they are utilizing new interview tools and methods to improve the hiring process. With employers realizing that traditional interviews alone may not identify certain soft skills or accurately identify areas of competency (or the lack of), they are introducing new strategies into the existing process.

Many employees have signed non-disclosure agreements or non-compete agreements, but a love contract? With all the recent news around sexual harassment in the workplace, employers are taking a new, stricter stance on romance in the office.

While the use of emoticons and emojis are more commonly utilized in texting and personal conversations, they are now making their way regularly into the workplace. But, can the use of emojis in work communications be a risk to your reputation?

The days of winter are passing, but in a month with so much cold, snow, and grey days, it can feel like we are stuck in Groundhog Day, just like the character Phil from the movie. Phil’s prediction for the weather, “It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life” has February written all over it. Some workers may be feeling the effects of these cold, gray days in this final stretch of winter.

Silver medal recruiting taking hold: Employers focusing on silver medalists are becoming winners. The term isn’t just for Olympians: It’s what some employers call job candidates they almost hired but passed over for someone else.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its annual report on union membership finding that the number of union members in the Unites States remained unchanged at 10.7% of the labor force. This statistic represents both wage and salaried workers in unions both in the private and public sectors. The number of employees belonging to unions in 2017 rose to 14.8 million, up 262,000 from 2016.

In May of last year, we artfully described the paradox of good economic news and low or moderate wage growth. At the time, the U.S. economy had just added 211,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate had fallen to its lowest level since 2007. However, what was missing in all that good news was signs of substantial wage growth.

Offering telemedicine could raise employer issues: Offering telemedicine services to employees can raise a number of legal issues, the most common being compliance with federal laws such as ERISA, COBRA, and HIPAA, as well as state laws concerning medical licensure and practice and informed consent.

Most federal gender pay discrimination cases are brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The other applicable law that was intended to address pay discrimination, the federal Equal Pay Act (EPA), was enacted before Title VII and was more narrow-focused.

In an interesting case involving exceptions to the overtime law of Maine, a missing comma and a simple conjunction forced a company to settle for $5 million to resolve overtime allegations. The question was simple – In Maine, are drivers distributing milk exempt from overtime? Maine’s overtime law had an exception for those workers involved in food “canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution.”

OFCCP issued new CSALs as of February 1: A new scheduling list has been compiled by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance for FY2018 using a neutral scheduling process and 1,000 CSALs were mailed to contractor establishments on February 1, 2018 addressed generically to HR Director.

Last month, LinkedIn released its 2018 Global Recruiting Trends Report. The report data is compiled through interviews with industry experts and a survey conducted with nearly 9,000 talent leaders and hiring managers internationally. It identifies major trends that are expected to define and drive talent acquisition in the coming year.

ICE enforcement is ramping up. On January 10th ICE announced a new three-prong approach to conduct worksite enforcement: (1) compliance through I-9 inspections, civil fines, and referrals for debarment; (2) enforcement through the arrest of employers knowingly employing undocumented workers and the unauthorized workers; and (3) outreach, through the ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers (IMAGE) program, to instill a culture of compliance and accountability. Are you...

As unemployment has steadily ticked down for the last several years, economists watched and waited for wage growth to start. Questions as to why a tightening labor market was not resulting in higher pay have been discussed and debated. As late as this week, an article in the New York Times (NYT)pointed to several macro force reasons wage movement was not behaving as economists have predicted.

Fertility benefits a growing trend for employers: The percentage of employers offering fertility benefits to employees is expected to grow from 55% in 2017 to 66% by 2019, according to the 2017 Maternity, Family and Fertility Benefits Survey from Willis Towers Watson. Of the employers currently offering fertility benefits, 65% offer coverage for fertility services to same-sex couples — a percentage expected to increase to 81% by 2019. Of employers offering and enhancing fertility...

CareerBuilder's annual forecast shows that 44% of employers plan to hire full-time, permanent employees in 2018 and half (51%) will hire temporary employees. But the most pressing question remains: how quickly can they fill those roles, if at all?

While more and more companies are conducting background checks and drug screening, there are still many employers who don’t want to spend the money it takes to complete a thorough background check. Penny wise, pound foolish is an old British saying that means to be extremely careful about small amounts of money and not careful enough about larger amounts of money. Failing to complete a full background check on new employees may be a pound foolish decision especially when...

“Naked” no poach agreements – what are they? Naked wage-fixing or no-poaching agreements among employers, whether entered into directly or through a third-party, are illegal under the antitrust laws. That means that if the agreement is separate from or not reasonably necessary to a larger legitimate collaboration between the employers, the agreement is deemed illegal without any inquiry into its competitive effect.

When you think of a psychopath, images of a serial killer are often a first reaction. Perhaps characters such as Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs or Patrick Bateman from American Psycho come to mind. But the vast majority of individuals that have psychopathic personality traits are nothing like the characters portrayed in the movies and are encountered in everyday life, including in the workplace.

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the requirements of the ACA have profoundly impacted small employer plans (under 50 employees) by raising costs at a faster rate than large employer plans.

EEO-1 Survey is now open: Click here to go to the survey. In order to log-in, the employer will need to reset its password on the EEO-1 site by clicking “Login” and then “Get Password.” An email with a link to reset the password will be sent.

On May 25, 2018, the European Union’s (EU’s) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect. This new regulation expands provisions for data collection, retention, and access rights for European based employees and are much more restrictive than in the past. The GDPR was initially adopted in April 2016, and the regulation and directive were published at that time. It replaces the 1995 data protection directive. The following is a brief...